BARRINGTON — Paul Harvey sits in a coffee shop with reprints of old newspaper articles on a table.

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Posted Jun. 21, 2014 @ 6:08 pm

BARRINGTON — Paul Harvey sits in a coffee shop with reprints of old newspaper articles on a table.

They are stories of a different time, and they are about his grandfather, a man named Flo Harvey, who once was a huge basketball star in New England.

This is about history, basketball, and maybe a little obsession. For Paul Harvey’s magnificent obsession is to get his grandfather into the Basketball Hall of Fame. To get him the recognition Paul Harvey believes he deserves, back before the name Flo Harvey became just another name lost in the mists of time, another name that exists only in the memory of family and on musty old reprints of old newspaper stories.

But there’s no question Flo Harvey once had a big-time game.

The old reprints tell you that.

Once upon a time he was called “Newport’s Mr. Basketball,” complete with the press clippings to prove it. He might only have been about 5-foot-8 or so, but he was called New England’s pioneer basketball player. He had begun playing as early as 1900. And at something called “Old Timers Night” at the old Rhode Island Auditorium on North Main Street in Providence in the 1950s, he was honored for 50 years of service to the game as both a player and coach.

In a 1955 column in The Journal, Lou Pieri, who owned both the Auditorium and a piece of the Celtics, said he thought that if Harvey had been playing in the NBA in his prime “he would average 50 points a game.”

So who was Flo Harvey?

He was born in Newport in 1885, began playing at the old Thames Street YMCA, and right from the beginning he had a gift for the game. At age 40, he began a team called the Newport Five, which barnstormed around New England. When he died in 1980 at the age of 94, his obituary in the Newport Daily News said that the Newport Five once came within a point of defeating the Original Celtics in Fall River in 1922.

The point is Flo Harvey was a star in his time, a living piece of New England basketball history. One of the stories said that he was forever traveling around New England in search of games, back when the country was so different, and the game was so different. In the winter of 1911 he played for a team from Attleboro. Another year he played for North Attleboro.

“He would play all over and have to be at work the next morning at the Navy base,” Paul Harvey says.

Is it any wonder he was once called the most famous basketball player in New England for the first 25 years of the 20th century? He once said he played in more than 1,000 basketball games, all the while having a full-time job. He was elected to the prestigious Helms Hall of Fame. He was named to one of the pre-1945 all-pro teams. One so-called expert of the era called him New England’s greatest pioneer basketball player.

There was even a “Flo Harvey Night” in Newport. It was held in the Rogers High School gym one night in September of 1965. The back of the program said “Newport salutes Mr. Basketball,” with a picture of a young Harvey in a basketball uniform with a big “N” on the front. On that night the first sentence of his bio in the program said that he was a candidate for the Hall of Fame.

He was named to the Helms Hall of Fame in the late 1950s, and by that time he had coached at Brown, St. George’s school, Rogers, and the old De La Salle Academy in Newport, all the while working full-time for the Navy.

There were even sports cartoons in the old Evening Bulletin by the esteemed Frank Lanning, one titled “some ‘experts’ are dragging their feet.” It went on to say how one basketball writer of the time had Flo Harvey on his all-time pre-World War II team.

So why isn’t he in the Basketball Hall of Fame?

That’s what Paul Harvey is trying to change.

“The problem is there aren’t a lot of stats on him,” Paul Harvey says. “A lot of stuff got lost through the years. And it’s been such a long time that no one remembers anymore. But he was never bitter. That was not him. He was always a gentleman about it. He didn’t want to criticize the game in any way. But I think the facts are there.”

Paul Harvey was an excellent athlete at the old Warren High School in the ’50s, All-State in football in 1954. He was one of those kids who lived for sports, as if it were in his genes. To this day he is physically active, in great shape. And he remembers his grandfather.

“He would come up from Newport and he would take me and my two brothers to the beach in his convertible,” he said.

On the table in front of us were several reprints of old newspaper stories from some long ago era. They are little slices of basketball history. But if everything is different, you don’t have to be the reincarnation of Red Auerbach to know that Flo Harvey was a super talent of his era.

“The facts are there,” stresses Paul Harvey, this 79-year-old man who has become his grandfather’s advocate.